#1 Publish as Many Irresistible Blog Posts as Possible

Now just to be clear, writing and publishing blog posts, no matter how riveting they are, will not on their own, get more readers to your blog.

However, if you use the right keywords and optimize your posts for search engines, there’s a good chance your content will be found by those looking for it. I’ll tell you more about keywords an search engine optimization next.

Think of each piece of content like it’s a piece of “bait on a fishing rod”. Each published post has the potential to reel in seekers who want to know more about what you have to offer.

For this reason it’s important that your content is amazing so when people get to your blog they want to hang around. Naturally the more content you have, the more chances you have of attracting more readers.

#2 Become an Expert Keyword User

One of the ways people find information is by searching online using any one of the search engines. The words they type into the search box is what is known as keywords.

This is an apt name since the right keywords have the potential to unlock the answers or content they are looking for.

Your challenge as a blogger is not only to write content that people want to read but to associate the content with the best keywords so that people looking find what they want when they get to your blog.

Once you know how to find popular keywords that are not too competitive, and you write content people expect to find when they use the keyword, you have a winner.

Becoming a keyword expert is no easy job. It takes lots of practice. Fortunately there is a lot of information and great tools available online to help with this.

#3 Optimize Your Posts for Search Engines

It’s not only important to know which keywords to use in your posts, but how to use them so that search engines are more likely to find your posts.

This is what is known as on page search engine optimization. What you’re aiming for is for search engines to index your posts. This is just a fancy way to say you want search engines to know you exist and have written a certain post.

Premium blog themes often build search optimization tools into their frameworks, but this is not necessary as there also useful plugins you can use to assist with this. Two popular options are ‘Yoast’ and ‘All in One SEO’

Using relevant keywords in the titles and text on your posts and pages, in the right quantity is important. You can also tell search engines which pages, posts, and links to ignore so they won’t show up in search results.

#4 Link to Other Relevant Blogs and Websites

When you link to other relevant blogs and websites from your content, this helps search engines to better understand your blog.

This in turn increases the trust and quality of your site, improving your on page search engine optimization strategy.

Secondly, it also provides a way to connect with and build relationships with other bloggers in the same niche.

Exchanging links can result in more targeted traffic to both blogs. Don’t link to too many other sites and make sure they are trusted and cover the topic well.

#5 Leave Comments on Relevant Blogs and Forums

When you leave meaningful comments on other blogs and forums in the same niche as yours, you leave a backlink to your own site.

Backlinks are also useful for search engine optimization. More than this, by leaving comments on other blogs you’re also building your brand’s presence.

Potentially you can attract visitors from other blogs this way, but only if the comment you leave is significant enough to get the attention of other readers.

Make sure your comments add value to the post. Aim for quality over quantity and to come across as an expert in your niche. If you do, other readers are likely to take note.

Also make sure you leave comments on popular blogs in your niche where there is already an audience for what you are offering.

#6 Use Social Media Marketing to Spread the Word

There are multi-million dollar businesses that only use social media marketing to inform others about what they are doing. Why?They know that social media is one of the most cost effective marketing methods to grow their presence exponentially.

You do not have to sign up with every social network that exists.Choose one or two that resonate with you, set up an account, and start connecting with people.

Each time you publish new content, share the link with your social networks.Make sure you write a few sentences as an introduction to your post so that your followers want to click on what you’re sharing.

Also ask the readers of your posts to share your content with their social networks. This is how things can start to work exponentially for you, when you get others sharing your content for you.

#7 Tell Others

Speak to any successful business owner, and they’ll tell you that the very best promotional tool is ‘word-of-mouth’. Best of all, it’s free, and you can start using it right now.

Tell everybody about your blog. The idea of doing this may feel a bit daunting when it comes to close friends and family, but I suggest you ‘get over it’ and just do it.

If you’re as serious about blogging as you say you are, and you believe in what you’re doing, then you should want to get as much feedback as you can, positive and negative.

Tell people you’ve just started and you’d love their help. Ask them to read your posts, and to let you know what they think. .People love being asked for their views. Tell them you value their opinion and then be open to whatever they have to say.

#8 Grow Your Own Email Community

The idea behind blogging is to create and develop relationships with your followers. One of the proven ways to do this is by creating an email community away from your blog where you can ‘deepen the love’.

It’s a great way to stay in touch with your followers since you can give them even more than what you already are on your blog. For example you can them access to freebies and tools you might create, let them know about special promotions as well as inform them about new blog posts.

Use one of the email auto-responder services. Some, like Mailchimp, will let you grow your list to as many as 1000 before they start charging you for the subscription.

#9 Join Online and Offline Communities

There are heaps of special interest groups on platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn where you can interact with other bloggers and support each other.

This is useful for spreading the word about your blog and attracting more followers. You might also want to think about joining subscription based Internet marketing communities and business platforms that facilitate networking which is also a way to bring people to your website.

One such community that I highly recommend is Wealthy Affiliate. Don’t forget that you can also join interest groups offline via sites like MeetUp where you can also engage with others who have an interest in the same niche as you.

#10 Guest Post on Other Blogs in Your Niche

Similar to leaving comments on high traffic, popular blogs in your niche, you can go one better by offering to write a guest post for these blogs.

You may have to start with some smaller blogs but once you get some experience and a reputation you’ll be able to pitch some bigger blogs.

As long as you can offer top class guest blog posts, and have no intentions of doing a ‘hard sell’, it’s an ideal way to get exposure on blogs that already get more traffic than your website.

You can often leave your bio and even a link to your website when you write a guest blog post. If people like what you have to say they will check you and your blog out.

#11 Incorporate Video in Your Posts

When you cover the subject of your blog post in part by using video, you are basically extending your organic search capability.

Many people do not favor reading text based content. When you use video to cover the same subject, you have the potential to also reach the crowd that prefer watching videos to reading.

Videos often come up in Google search results and since YouTube is really just a video search engine, people could find your site as a result of searching for videos on the platform.

Besides which, adding video to your posts is an excellent way to get your audience’s attention and keep them on your site once they get there.

Click on the video below to see the video I made for this post.

#12 Advertise

I’ve left this one to last, because although paid search, social media advertising and display advertising is an excellent way of attracting visitors to your site, it’s also a more advanced strategy.

It pays to know what you’re doing when it comes to advertising and you must be very clear in your own head about what you want to achieve.

Not only will this cost you money but it can end up costing quite a lot depending on your niche and the keywords for which you want to compete. My suggestion is to get some sound advertising training behind you before attempting this method.

How do People Find my Blog? – Wrap Up

Asking how do people find my bog is a critical question to ask yourself as a blogger. Without people visiting your blog it will die very quickly.

Blogging is about people interacting with each other in a specific way, so naturally people are an essential component of any successful blog.

How you get readers to your blog is up to you. I have covered 12 ways here. They’re not the only ways, but unless you are already something of a master with all the above already, I don’t think there’s a need to find more just yet.

What do you think?

Got Questions? Something to say? Leave a comment. Let’s chat

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There are some that believe that guest posting is not as effective as before but I don’t agree with this. What has changed is that it has become a lot harder to get accepted to write a guest post on one of the big name blogs.

They can afford to be fussy but as long as you have studied their blog and audience and can come up with something unique and well written, that will appeal to their readership, it is still possible to use guest posting to spread your influence.

Some great advice here for me to implement on my own small blog (that is struggling at the moment!).

I didn’t realise the power of linking out to other people’s blogs, as you point out here – it apparently aids search engines to better understand your blog. My question is this – how many times should you link out to other websites in one article posting?

Most blogs start off with a bit of a struggle my friend. Have patience and keep working at it and I am sure it will pay off.

I have read that linking out too often can also be regarded as a spam tactic so it’s not a good idea to have too many links per article. I would keep it to one or two.

Generally I always have at lest one external link and I usually link to an authority site like Wikipedia. So for example if you are writing about email marketing you will find that there is a Wikipedia page on this subject that you can link to once using ’email’ as anchor text. I do in addition link to another blog if I am referring to the blogger specifically or something they may have written about that’s related.

Hello Mark and thank you for this informative post. I really enjoyed reading it. Since I am a blogger myself, I try to learn something new every day and expand my horizons and knowledge.

I loved the tactics you showed in your post. My personal favorites are keyword using, social sharing and optimizing your posts and website for search engines. I am not saying that other factors are not relevant as well.

I just think that proper use and combination of these 3 brings great results in exposing your blog.

You have some really great tips here, and ones that everyone who really wants to make an impact with their blog would be very wise to follow. I will certainly be trying to take on board some that I am not currently using.

I wonder if you could tell me where to find the type of forums which you mention, that is one tip I really must take up?

And would you mind saying how you made your video? Again, video is something I have been shying away for some time, and I need to bite the bullet there!

I really think that you have covered the most important aspects of what to do to get your blog posted – I certainly cannot think of any other relevant ones.

I still think that developing a presence in a couple of good, active forums is useful for spreading the word about your brand. The best way to find forums is simply to search in Google by typing ‘Your niche’+’forums’ so an example might be gardening+forums and you should get a good list to check out. Just make sure that they have enough members and are still active.

Another good place is to answer questions is on sites like YahooAnswers and Quora. In fact I can spend far too much time doing this sometimes. It also helps to give you a good idea for blog content when you see the same questions coming up time and time again. 😉

I use Lumen5 (not an affiliate link) to make this kind of video. It is very easy once you play around with it a bit and get some practice. I got a good deal via AppSumo on the Pro membership but there is a free level too.

These are excellent tips, Mark. Some marketing experts suggest that more time should be spent promoting blog posts than time spent developing the content. As I recall, Derek Halpern, of Social Triggers fame, says he spends 80% of his time promoting his content. I suggest that everyone learn your 12 ways, but pick several as primary and focus efforts on those.

That’s a great checklist, particularly about writing quality content. Sometimes I Google a subject and the top couple of rankings just say what I already know and lack any further detail. Or maybe it’s my poor Google searching! 🙂 But, yes, please write about the subject in depth. There are tons of sites with superficial information about subjects. Maybe we’re turning into a superficial world 🙂

However, to the matter in hand. I found this coz I was looking for ways to get more traffic – aren’t we all!? You cover most of the SEO-related ways. I know this is an overview so not the place for detail, but I am looking for more about social media marketing. It works incredibly well but the main problem I find is that it takes such a long time to implement successfully. Or much money! To a large degree, it’s about building trust and you only do that by posting interesting and relevant content. And that takes time. Dunno if you have any thought or ideas on that.

Video and YouTube are massively under-used at the moment – great vid that, by the way. How long did that take to produce? I think YT is a great place from which to drive traffic. But it’s all about having enough time to do all this stuff. The one video I tried making took me a day 🙂

I appreciate your comment and agree with your sentiments. Sometimes it’s a challenge to find truly unique or detailed ‘how to’ information about some topics.

I think you hit the nail on the head when you say that social media success is dependent on posting interesting and relevant content over time. Of course you also need to stand out in some way so that people even see you to begin with. 😉

The problem is that we are impatient but in my experience, building a presence and trust can only be done by focusing on memorable branding plus writing lots of great content and giving it as much time as it needs.It’s probably not the answer that any of us want to hear but so far I have not seen that there is any other way.

I hear you when you say videos can take a lot of time. Again, there are also a lot of videos that not great so if you can come up with something that is easy to produce as well as different but quality, then you’ll have a great advantage.

The video on this post probably took me about an hour at most but then I am getting faster at producing these short videos as I do more of them. I use Lumen5 (not an affiliate link) to make this kind of video and I have to say it is really easy. I got a good deal via AppSumo on the Pro membership but there is a free level too so maybe it’s an idea to give it a go and see if it works for you.

I have heard of Yoast but not that familliar with it and, many seem to be satisfied with it. Do you think it’s better than “All in One SEO”? As a fellow member of WA I use a WordPress theme that has the latter already installed as do many of the WP themes. Is it worth considering switching?

linking to other posts/sites is, indeed as excellant idea with more internal links than external. Internal links can keep traffic on your site longer as well.

Backlinks. How do they work and, more importantly, how does a backlink get attached to my comment that is left on another website? Do I include a link in my comment?

Word of Mouth is something I have done but only occasionally. Sounds like I should step that up and share more. We are part of an exceptional training platform and everyone interested in IM or Blogging should be told about this.

Lots of questions, sorry but I have just one more. Why are there two #10’s?

I don’t think there’s too much difference between Yoast and All in One SEO. I use the latter and I think it does a good enough job so unless you’re having issues I’d just stick with what you’re using for now.

Backlinks from comments is not as easy as it used to be which came about because of spammers of course. Most blogs have do not follow links activated but according to many marketers these links are still useful.

Basically you have to leave comments manually on sites where you can type your site URL into the details box. It won’t show up as link on your comment though. Definitely don’t put a link into your comment itself as this will definitely be regarded as spammy.

In my opinion, the best use for commenting is to attract incidental traffic by leaving a great comment which gets other’s attention, so they look you up to find out more about you.

I agree with you about word of mouth, it’s something we definitely don’t do enough of.

Thanks for the comment and by the way, great questions, Wayne! No need to ever apologize for asking questions here. 😉 It’s how we learn and if you have a question in mind, it’s likely others do too.

Thanks too for spotting that there were two #10’s in how do people find my blog. That was definitely unintentional but as a result of your excellent proof reading, I’ve corrected it now. 🙂

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